#yearnotes 2021….Emergency Alerts, Prisons and hot sauce.
This year has played out in three phases. Pushing to get a critical service over the line, starting a new role remotely and setting up a new business. It’s been eventful and at times exhausting but i’m happy with the choices I’ve made and the opportunities this year.
Going all out for UK Emergency Alerts
Since May 2020 I’d been working with DCMS, Cabinet Office and GDS full time on the project to deliver Emergency Alerts for the UK. This service had a troublesome history, notably falling between Government departments responsibilities as well as funding challenges that meant it never made it to the top of the priority list. The national lockdown in March 2020 changed all this when mobile operators were asked to send SMS messages to all phones in the UK* This exposed the need for a cell broadcast based alerting capability with the facility to send messages to millions of handsets with no delay, no impact on network congestion and no requirement to know telephone numbers in advance.
*and again on the 26 December 2021 with a ‘Get Boosted’ SMS message.
In early 2021 we were still in the throes of building the capability, consisting of a central alerting engine known as the Cell Broadcast Entity (CBE) being built by GDS on the Notify Platform and cell broadcasting centre (CBC) software deployed onto each of the four UK mobile operators networks (4G/5G). On the handsets side, work continued with Samsung, Google and Apple for the relevant software updates to enable handsets in the UK to receive emergency alerts. I was relieved to see Apple finally drop iOS 14.5 at the end of April with the inclusion of emergency alert options.
In readiness for service launch, we needed to carry out some live testing, initially on the ‘operator channel’. This is effectively a channel which most people don’t have access to or would require delving deep into their Android phone settings to enable it. Apple doesn’t allow access to any test messages in the UK. If you’re curious about cell broadcast channels you can read more here. Being the only member of the team involved with the original mobile alerting trials (2013–2015) and leading the Cell Broadcast Trials for the Environment Agency in 2019, I took on the task of leading what became known as Demo ‘A’.
Demo A was held in Reading on 9 March 2021 and was designed to test the alerting infrastructure end to end. The goal was to ensure successful transmission of a message from the alerting engine, through the networks, onto handsets. It was the first test at scale in the UK outside of a test lab. It was a huge team effort with lots of moving parts, multiple messages including testing bilingual alerts, range of different handset models in various modes, cancelling alerts, expiry of alerts, people stationary, others travelling and so on.
Was it a success? Before the Demo a colleague suggested that success would be detecting a failure or discovering something new or unexpected. The test identified an issue which would have caused a critical error in targeting messages at scale, such as in a national message. Recording the multiple handset responses, receipt/non-receipt of messages for all the participants was no mean feat. Demo A had proved to be an essential exercise in readiness for a UK wide service. Delivering this was a team effort, thanks to all those involved from DCMS, Cabinet Office, GDS, NCSC, Fujitsu, Azenby, Environment Agency, Vodafone, O2, Three UK, EE, Virgin, Giff Gaff, Tesco Mobile, Samsung, One2Many, Nokia and 23Red.
Demo A was my last major piece of delivery working for the Environment Agency before I moved on. Just before departing, I was fortunate enough to take one last trip south to visit O2 where we successfully sent Emergency Alert messages on the public channel to iPhones for the first time in the UK outside of a lab. A nice milestone to sign off on.
Whilst I was very much hoping DCMS would stick to the original launch timescales meaning I would see the service live before departing the project, this was not meant to be. This has now pushed back into 2022, I was however, fortunate enough to join the team for the first public test of Emergency Alerts in East Suffolk which the team called Demo A+ in May 2021.
Moving to HMPPS Digital (Ministry of Justice)
After what felt like an age since my interview in December 2020, I started with HMPPS (Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service) Digital on the 1 May 2021. I won’t dwell on the detail of leaving the EA, that could easily be the subject of another blog but my move to HMPPS was definitely the right step at the right time.
Prior to departing, I recall Harriet Green and I were working on a slide pack which i’d titled: The Good, the Bad and the Pink Tickets. The latter being the blockers which the Environment Agency really needs to tackle in order for digital transformation to stand a chance. As I highlighted in the slides, people would, and were, starting to leave the organisation as a result of not tackling these issues.
I wanted to continue my digital journey, learning from teams and individuals who are leading and delivering some of the very best digital services in Government. I also wanted to work for an organisation that really ‘gets’ digital, understanding its meaning, and is not just seen an additional channel or bolt on to existing structures, services and systems.
I was both delighted and relieved to find that HMPPS Digital matched my expectations with hugely talented people working on some of the most complex problems and delivering user centred services that are really making a difference to peoples lives. The sense of community is strong, working openly is just the norm and internet era ways of working are just baked in. There are of course challenges and constraints with legacy systems, funding models and business priorities, but there is a willingness to influence and tackle these, not just accept as-is.
I, like many others, joined a new organisation during the pandemic which meant for the first few months at least, meeting all of my colleagues and team members via video. I have to say my fellow Service Owners; Sharon Hepworth, Kevin Marshall, Malcolm Casimir, Jess Morrow, Alice Noakes together with our Deputy Director, Sophie Otter, all gave me a fantastic welcome.
Since May I’ve been the Service Owner for Entering and Leaving Prisons. The work we’re delivering has the greatest impact on reception and the OMU (Offender Management Unit). If we can build services that make these two key areas more efficient by meeting the needs of the staff, then they’ll have more time to focus on the things that really make a difference such as prisoner rehabilitation. This in turn has a direct impact on reducing reoffending.
Three services we currently have in development are firstly, ‘Welcome People into Prison’ designed to improve how we do just that, providing a better experience for staff and prisoners whilst at the same time improving the quality of our data and helping extract ourselves from legacy systems.
The second is ‘Calculate Release Dates’ designed to tackle what is a seriously complex maths problem that I never knew existed before joining HMPPS Digital. I assumed once a Judge had passed a sentence then the release date would be straightforward with some adjustment for someone granted a licence. What I’ve now come to realise is that my assumption was a huge simplification. Remand time, the type of offence, and therefore sentence, the date the offence was committed, consecutive or concurrent sentences, added days are just some of the factors which influence when a person is released. The fact is there are people up and down the country manually calculating, recalculating, checking and blind checking these dates and this consumes a huge amount of staff time.
Whilst rare, there are errors made sadly which means people are released early or later than they should. We aim to transform this processes by creating a service which takes all that complexity away and does the hard work for the user.
The third service in progress is ‘Create and Vary a Licence’. As the name suggests we aim to streamline both the creation and variation of licences which stretches across prison and probation. The current approach creates friction between prison and probation together with uncertainty over timescales. Prisons often need to release people with licences at short notice so ensuring these are accurate and timely is key. The team are keen to address the pain points for all parties as well as move on to making licences more understandable for those being released.
My service area operates with internal and managed service teams all of which are outstanding at what they do and led by a fabulous group of product managers, Louise, Laura & Jonny, thank you! The three teams have all successfully progressed through discovery phases to private beta in six months.
I’ve had a whole pile of acronyms, systems and processes to navigate, many of which are now starting to stick thankfully. Shortly, after I started, my colleagues recommended Carl Cattermole’s Prison Survival Guide and Chris Atkins Bit of a Stretch, both of which have been helpful reading!
Chris describes exactly what HMPPS Digital is aiming to do when he refers to reducing the bureaucracy. Freeing up staff time really will have an incredibly positive impact for both staff and prisoners.
Some of the most memorable times this year with HMPPS Digital have been our prison visits, 12 in total since May. These have been essential for me to connect with those who use our services in all forms. Hearing about user needs second hand is just not me, I really need to see/hear/feel it for myself.
I’ve also been thoroughly grateful for the camaraderie, friendship and the supportive unit that is our Service Owner Group + Deputy Director. This year has been challenging, stretching, and at times somewhat manic, but our team is just a fabulous unit, able to get the perfect balance between hard work and making it an enjoyable place to be, thank you.
I’ll finish this section of 2021 by saying that the challenges HMPPS digital are tackling are huge but that’s precisely what makes them interesting and rewarding problems to crack. Working with Prisons is a unique environment which few get to experience and we are always interested to hear from those working in digital. Our latest roles are advertised here.
Saucing a new business?
So whilst moving to HMPPS Digital, I was also supporting my partner to start up and scale a new business. Since 2015, finding work had always been a struggle so when the country-wide lockdown started we decided to turn my partners hobby into something more formal. Yoyo had already made her ginger chilli sauce for friends the previous year and this had been very well received so we took the next step to commercialise this.
We started small, producing just a dozen bottles or so at local markets and followed some recommendations early on to make the sauce vegan so it had a wider appeal as well as investing in the branding. We worked with Paul at Hartson Creative to create a fabulous design and brand that we are really happy with.
Our website quickly followed with both a retail and wholesale section and Yoyo started to create different versions of the ginger chilli sauce. We started to sell larger quantities directly into shops and the hard work really started to pay off . In September we were absolutely thrilled to win a Great Taste Award.
Keeping on the Great Taste theme we‘re excited that our sauce will be featured in Great Taste Book for 2022 (you can see last year’s version here). This is Distributed to over 150,000 trade and consumer buyers. 55,000 copies printed and distributed through trade and consumer titles and a further 94,000 digital copies. No doubt this will generate further interest next year.
Towards the end of this year, we attended a whole variety of events and Christmas Markets breaking all our record sales seemingly each week. It’s certainly not been easy and a few days off at Christmas were very welcome!
It’s been worth all the hard work, given Yoyo a real sense of purpose and something she can be proud of. Whilst our sales continue to grow we thought we would also do our bit for Laos too. At the start of December we established our link with Mines Advisory Group who carry out mine clearance in Laos and other countries affected by unexploded ordnance. Unexploded bombs have killed 20,000 people since the Vietnam War ended, almost half have been children. We’re now donating 10p from the sale of every bottle to MAG, helping to make countries like Laos safer.
So the success in 2021 with Yoyo Laos Sauce, rounded off the year which has definitely been eventful. Despite all our lives continuing to be impacted by the pandemic, this year has been remarkable in many ways. A thank you to colleagues, friends, family, colleagues, customers and stockists for their support and kindness in 2021 and wishing you all the very best for 2022.
